the horseshoe.

I’m definitely no expert on political science or government—let’s get that out of the way - but this idea keeps coming up, and the more people I tell it to, the agreement I get. (Mostly.)

It seems we’ve got four parties in our government. Woke. Liberal. Conservative. MAGA.

(A quick word about “woke”. It’s a loaded term and one I was hesitant to use, which says something actually, about how extreme that side can be and how nervous I am of it. Or maybe it’s just because I have some Woke biases and tendencies because I didn’t feel that way about MAGA. Regardless, I don’t mean to offend with any of these words but they are words most people understand and they speak for themselves.)

Woke and Liberal are, obviously, under the Democratic umbrella.
Conservative and MAGA are, obviously under the Republican umbrella.

I’m not sure on this one but I think most Republicans don’t really want to be MAGA.
I also don’t think most Democrats want to be Woke.

Gotta give it to the Republican Party (as far as winning an election), they go all in with their side no matter what and, it seems, they’ve gone, and are going, all in with their extreme: MAGA (we’ll see how far). The Democrats had an opposite problem - they were more Liberal but tried to keep the Woke around. They tend to try to make everyone happy. I don’t know whether I think they should or shouldn’t but I do think all Democrats not going “all-in” on Liberal or Woke cost them in the election. There were splits that MAGA (aka Republicans) didn’t have. The enthusiasm was not the same and that enthusiasm gap was the difference.

Anyway… the horseshoe shape has been used to describe lots of things, in extremes. The further you get from the middle, the closer you actually get to the other extreme. I do believe MAGA and Woke are actually very similar - it’s just the targets of their rage that are different. It’s just who they want to cancel that are different. It’s just who offends them that is different.

I do believe Liberal and Conservative are also pretty similar too - I wrote a whole post about it.

I do believe whatever party go backs to Liberal and Conservative again (the middle) will dominate for a long time. It’ll be interesting to see if either can.

And maybe—just maybe—there aren’t actually four sides like I started this whole thing. Maybe there are only two: a massive middle and the small, loud extremes. Somehow, the system got us thinking we all hate each other and can’t agree on anything.

But what if that’s not true? What if there’s a chance to change that? What if the middle started putting the extremes back in their corners and got some actual shit done again? Maybe we could stop talking so much about the extremes, we mostly aren’t, and start talking more about the middles, we mostly are, and what that actually could mean for our future.